Requiring a monk's patience

I have started packing, carefully taping together boxes and stacking them, deciding to tackle first the videos and DVDs. Almost two years of being without a proper living room has left a series of boxes filled with multimedia, stashed in the basement and upstairs annex. The boxes have been routinely reopened then stashed again because we wanted to watch a particular film. We'd dig through the box with a flashlight, halfhazardly re-taping it shut the next day, or not. The whole thing is a giant disorganized mess.

The hardest thing with packing and organizing for a move like this is that half of our things will go to Mexico and half will stay here in France. I won't drag all the books or videos. I'll separate them and decide what we'd like to take leaving the lions share here in the rented storage facility the company has offered us. So you see the dividing is what makes the packing such a long process!

When my friend Bea asked me how the packing was going this week (because she'd done the same thing last year) I said "fine but almost impossible with with a toddler trying to help." It's like having a mischievous little elfin by your side. No sooner has a video been divided in to one box and arranged then it is removed and tossed aside or shoved under the bed or worse cried over because it needs to be inserted in the machine to watch (because videos go in the machine and not in a box, duh mommy!) So I feel like I go one step forward two steps back. I will never finish packing and I will end up with French Yoga tapes in Mexico that won't play on the machine while my Godfather series sits sweating it out in a Lyon storage warehouse.

I found this funny video on YouTube about a toddler caught on film destroying a delicate sand art mosaic created by monks. See, look at the havoc these little guys can wreak in an instant! The mom has her back turned for all of two seconds. These poor patient monks must understand the true meaning of patience now. You can see the monk interviewed is really frustrated but he doesn't want to say lose his cool: "so now we have three days only so we have to struggle more hard" Meanwhile we mothers have to "struggle more hard" every day. Welcome to our world guys. Mother's of toddlers have the patience of monks, genetically.

Here's the link if the video doesn't work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J_Ctk4-IoQ